Surely during the coming three years of renovations to
Gilman Hall, the Homewood campus will resound with
anguished cries of "When will it ever end?" To answer that
question, and to ameliorate the suffering a bit, the
Krieger School has created the Web site "Diary of a
Renovation: Transforming Gilman Hall." It offers "an
insider's look" at what's going on behind the construction
barriers, with stories updated monthly about the ongoing
work, photographs, and architectural renderings. The site
also features a sweet video, "The Heart of Gilman Hall," in
which faculty share their thoughts about what the building
means to the study of humanities at Johns Hopkins, and
alumni share their memories of the place (and confess to
just how much time they spent sleeping there).—Catherine Pierre

Chelsea Gonzales, Engineering '11, examined
contraception and unwanted pregnancy. People during this
time feared miscarriage, as well as complications during
pregnancy and labor. This was evident, Gonzales found, in
letters Charles Carroll of Carrollton wrote to his son. As
each of his daughter-in-law Harriet's seven pregnancies
neared conclusion, the senior Carroll would write, hoping
for a "safe and happy delivery." One letter said, "I hope
to God she will not lose the infant ... miscarriages impair
greatly the constitution."

Gillian Maguire, A&S '08, looked into midwives, the
appearance of male midwives, and the emergence of doctors
trained in a new field called the "obstetric arts." Maguire
discovered that during delivery, only male medical
professionals were licensed to use instruments such as
forceps, and they took a more aggressive role in the
birthing process than female midwives.

Welcome Little Stranger is on exhibit through March
30 at Homewood Museum.—Maria Blackburn

New idea links volcanic processes and erosion to explain
land formations
Hopkins geologist Bruce Marsh, working with new findings
from his most recent expedition to the McMurdo Dry Valleys
of Antarctica, has proposed a novel explanation for the
valleys' land formations that links his theory of magmatic
processes with surface erosion. Marsh, a Krieger School
professor of Earth and
planetary sciences, says that as magma pushed up from
deep inside the Earth, it fractured the crust into pieces,
then temporarily sealed the fractures. This process welded
the stress pattern into a sort of template for wind, snow,
rain, and ice to sculpt the landscape through erosion,
following the pattern of fractures preserved by the magma.
The McMurdo Dry Valleys form a unique natural laboratory
because the terrain has remained basically unchanged for
180 million years. Marsh delivered his findings to a recent
meeting of the American Geological Society.—DK

Active teens become slimmer adults
Adolescents who participate in physical education five days
a week are 28 percent less likely to become overweight as
adults. Researchers from the Bloomberg School of Public
Health, led by Robert Wm. Blum, professor of
population and reproductive health, studied 3,345
teenagers in grades 8-12. The study's results appeared in
the January issue of Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent
Medicine.

Nucleic acid turns off tumor gene
In the January 10 issue of Nature, a Hopkins team
reported finding a noncoding RNA nucleic acid that turns
off a tumor-suppressing gene. Most genes in human DNA have
nearby strands of RNA, called "antisense RNA"; this is the
first observation of antisense RNA interfering with a gene
that normally suppresses the runaway cell growth of
cancerous tumors. Co-author Andrew Feinberg, director of
the Epigenetics Center at Johns Hopkins, said in a press
release that the findings "bring us closer to solving two
outstanding mysteries in biology, namely what all those
noncoding RNAs do in cells, and how tumor-suppressor genes
get turned off." —DK

MIMI: Acronym for magnetospheric imaging instrument,
the package of sensors on Cassini that mapped Saturn's ring
current. One of the sensors, INCA (for "ion and neutral
camera") takes a "snapshot" of the ring current about every
five minutes, and those snapshots can be put together in a
movie, of sorts, that shows what all those captured ions in
the magnetic field are doing.

Ring current: A ring of electric current, produced by
energetic ions trapped in a planet's magnetic field. Around
Earth, ring currents are ephemeral, showing up only during
disturbances in the solar wind. But around Saturn, the ring
current is always present.

Saturnian plasma sheet: A transient population of
charged particles — ions, protons, and electrons
— trapped outside the ring current, mostly on the side
of Saturn away from the sun. The solar wind pulls this plasma
sheet out in a sort of long tail. The particles come from the
solar wind and from water vapor ejected by Enceladus, one of
Saturn's major moons.

Magnetosphere: The region of space dominated by a
planet's magnetic field. The boundary between the solar wind
and a planet's magnetic field is the magnetopause.
—DK

... The
Peabody Institute announced in January that it had
renewed its collaboration with the Yong Siew Toh
Conservatory of Music (YSTCM) in Singapore. Officials from
Johns Hopkins University and the National University of
Singapore signed the renewal agreement in November. The
first agreement was signed in 2001, and YSTCM opened two
years later. The school now has 24 full-time and 24
part-time faculty, an international student body, and a
state-of-the-art conservatory building to call home. The
new agreement aims to develop new programming, create joint
performances between Peabody and YSTCM, and develop
three-way collaborations with other international
institutions.

...Clinical trials conducted in Uganda and Kenya
showing that circumcision is an effective way to prevent
the transmission of HIV made Time magazine's
December 24 list of the top 10 medical breakthroughs of the
year. The Uganda trials were conducted by Bloomberg School of Public
Health researchers Maria Wawer and Ronald Gray. (See "Cutting the Risk"
in our September issue.) Because of that work, the World
Health Organization and UNAIDS now endorse circumcision as
part of a prevention package for HIV-negative men.—CP